Shadows Will Fall Behind You
by Solstice Zero
Summary: Jack and Ianto in the Flat Holm Lighthouse.


_Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you._  
-**Walt Whitman**

**

* * *

  
**

The rounded glass brought everything just slightly out of focus. It was vaguely dirty, vaguely rippled; old glass, and it just served to make everything seem a little further away. A little more untouchable. Ianto watched the sky through the crossed metal frames. He watched the gulls wheel, cawing, on thermal swells. He breathed in the hot air of the lighthouse platform.

The taste of bile was receding, finally, from the back of his throat, and that was all right. His palms pressed the grated metal floor, enough to indent them with tiny crisscrossed patterns, but the bite of it kept him tethered to the physical, even as his head seemed to expand infinitely, encompass everything, the way the lighthouse did. Through the glass the sunlight was refracted, intensified, and he had long ago stripped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, the faint pink stained dark, he was certain, with wet patches beneath his arms. Still. It was all right. The heat rolled around him, filled him up, made him feel as though he was made from air, a hot air balloon, something nonphysical, no density, no mass. Like he was made of thought. He breathed out.

"Hiding?"

Ianto smiled faintly, pressing his back against the pole between his shoulder blades, letting his head fall back at an angle, eyes closed. "It's hardly hiding if you can find me so easily, sir." He heard the black-yellow striped gate swing open and Jack's boots hit the metal floor. He wondered briefly why he had not heard them on the stairs. "Are you part cat, by any chance?"

Jack seemed unruffled by the non sequitur. "Can't say that I am." Ianto opened his eyes, head still tilted back so that he could see Jack shrug out of his coat and lay it carefully over the railing that ran around the lighthouse mirror. "I've met some cat people, though. Nice girls." He came around to where Ianto sat and settled across from and to the left of him. He leaned back against the glass, and Ianto could imagine how warm it must be against Jack's back, the glass heated by a day's worth of sun. He wanted suddenly to press his hands against it, on either side of Jack, press his hands against the glass and his face against Jack's chest, no difference in the warmth. The light threw a golden shawl over Jack's shoulders and down his sides, making his blue shirt brilliant, buttons shining, red braces dramatic and pronounced.

Ianto laid a hand over the toe of Jack's outstretched boot and rocked it lightly back and forth, his eyes half-lidded. Jack smiled at the playful gesture.

"I didn't run," Ianto said. His own lazy smile did not change, and he closed his eyes and let his head drop back again. He could feel the sun on his skin, the prickle of it, so concentrated and warm. His hand on Jack's boot didn't still.

"I know," Jack said.

"I walked," Ianto said. "Quickly. Away."

"I saw."

"I suppose," Ianto considered slowly, "in a metaphorical sense, one might call that running."

"We don't have to call it running."

"We aren't terribly metaphorical." Ianto let his head roll forward and took in Jack's easy, passive face, and thought about how much he liked that face, how much he liked Jack like this, alone with the sky and the sun. "I love you," he said.

Jack smiled. "Thank you."

Ianto nodded. It was wonderful, the heat. Clean. It filled every sense and took the dark and mold away from him, took the antiseptic and the sawdust. The bile was back. He swallowed against it. "Why did you take me here?"

"I need your help. I need you to help me keep this place operational. It's getting too big."

That was a terrible thought. Ianto eschewed it, like moving around a rock in a river, paddling all on one side. "Why not one of the others? Gwen."

Jack shrugged, watching the metronome tick of his boot back and forth, Ianto's constant touch. "I trust you."

Ianto's lazy smile again, directed to the ceiling, glass giving way to metal. "You trust her, too. You came back for her, too. You love her."

Jack smiled and shrugged again, relaxing further back against the glass, taking up Ianto's loose calm. "I do. But I wanted you."

Ianto grinned, filled his lungs with a few seconds worth of warm air and exhaled a gentle _ahhhhh._ "You've not got to show me your secret island hospital to get your hands in my pants, Jack. Naught to do but ask."

Jack laughed. "I wanted you to know about this. I think you can deal with it better."

Ianto considered this, tilting his head to the side, the heat pressing down on his chest, his arms, his legs. "My mum was in psychiatric. Is that why you think I can deal with it?" Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. The tempo of a ballad.

"That's why."

Ianto giggled. It shook his chest and dislodged some of the heavy sunlight there. "You've terrible people skills, even after a few hundred years of trying."

Jack's eyebrows knit together. "Why?"

Ianto sighed and shook his head, as though telling a child _again_ that no, they could not have the candy. "It was my _mum_," he said. "They trapped her behind a door and put her telly in a cage." He laughed at the image. Paul O'Grady shouting through the bars. "Anyway." He sobered. Tried to sober. The light fluttered over Jack's face with the shadow of a seagull and Ianto was distracted by the change. He trailed off, watching to see if the shadow would happen again. Jack seemed to be watching his face the same way. Was there a gull shadow there? Did it stutter the light the same way?

"I'm sorry," Jack said softly. "I didn't think of that."

Ianto tried to shrug, but couldn't seem to muster his shoulders into the same easy nonchalance that Jack managed. It was more of a roll, which _tock_ed Jack's foot once again. "Course you didn't. It's all right." Ianto's eyes trailed out toward where he felt the buildings to be, the little ones that led to the underground rooms where Jack hid the sick and sad and mad. "It was a surprise." _Tick._ "They liked visitors at Providence Park, too, and they all came up the same way, with the same faces and eyes and words and everything, and I was just nine again and I had to leave." _Tock._ "I'll help because you need me to, but I'll hate every single second that I'm here."

"You don't have to. I'll-"

"Gwen would hate it, too." Ianto nodded to himself. He stared at Jack's boot. Drummed his fingers on the rubber sole. "She'd hate it more than me, because I just think of mum, but she would think of them." He gestured out to the buildings that he could not see. "She'd feel bad for all of them, where I'm only feeling bad for myself, so it's easier."

Jack stared at him. "I can't decide if that's selfishness or martyrdom."

Ianto grinned. It was absolutely dazzling. He could feel how dazzling it was, shining in the light, like his teeth were made of diamonds. "Saint Jeff. Patron Saint of Dangerous Driving." Jack stared at him while Ianto tried to decide where he had heard that before.

Jack let it go. "Want to go back?"

"No," Ianto said. He let go of Jack's boot and reached up to grab the rail and haul himself to his feet. He swayed unsteadily for a moment, then took a step forward and leaned against the glass, before turning his back to it and sliding slowly down to the floor, next to Jack. Jack watched him, humor in his eyes, until Ianto reached out and pulled him over by the shoulders. Jack ended up with his knees on either side of Ianto's hips, straddling Ianto's waist, his arms supporting him against the glass, his hands pressed there on either side of Ianto's head. Ianto's hands curled in Jack's hair, and he smiled up at him, absolutely beatific, absolutely untarnished. He pulled Jack down and met his lips with a soft, insistent kiss, until Jack had to drop his arms to move closer, settled one hand on the small of Ianto's back, the other cradling the back of Ianto's head against the glass.

When they parted, Ianto sighed and leaned his head back. "I was right." And he closed his eyes. "Warm." Jack smiled and stood, moving to pick up Ianto's jacket from where he had flung it on arriving at the lighthouse platform. "Incidentally," Ianto said behind him, "I think one of the nurses might have injected me with a sedative as I was leaving."

"Might have done," Jack said, smirking as he flapped the jacket, attempting to get the creases out before folding it once, twice.

"Pretty strong, I reckon."

"She was a little plunger-happy, yeah." Jack crossed back over to Ianto and knelt next to him as he started to slump and slide down the glass.

"I'm just going to close my eyes for a minute."

Jack took Ianto by the shoulders and directed him slowly down to where his jacket was folded on the floor as a pillow. "You do that."

Ianto reached out and grabbed Jack's wrist, surprising him. Jack looked at his face, and saw the sudden worry in his eyes. "You'll be here when I wake up, won't you?"

Jack nodded. "I'll be here."

Ianto nodded. Then he smiled slowly. "This is our date," he said.

Jack laughed. "One of them," he said.

"I like it." He let go of Jack's wrist and closed his eyes, nuzzling his head into the jacket. "'S warm."

Jack settled back against the glass beside Ianto's head. He watched as Ianto's chest began to rise and fall more slowly, until it finally evened out into the tempo of sleep._ Tick._

_Tock._

Jack settled his hand gently into Ianto's hair. He sighed and leaned his head back against the slowly cooling glass.

He drifted as he felt the sun set.


End file.
